


Leave the Light On

by lilithenaltum



Series: Lilithenaltum's Tony Stark Bingo Collection [2]
Category: Black Panther (2018), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Road Trip, Americana, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Freeform, Grief/Mourning, May/December Relationship, Road Trips, Tony Stark Bingo 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-05
Updated: 2019-04-05
Packaged: 2020-01-05 10:04:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18363818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilithenaltum/pseuds/lilithenaltum
Summary: Grief is a lot like the open highway; it stretches on and on between valleys and canyons and interludes of bright lights and heavy traffic. Sometimes the best way to navigate it is to bring someone along. So when Tony Stark invites Shuri Udaku on a cross country road trip two weeks before the anniversary of her father's death, she takes a chance and jumps headfirst into something that will leave a permanent mark on her heart....Written for Round 2 of the Tony Stark Bingo, 2019.Square: A3-Free SpaceMixtape onSpotify.





	1. one

Baba dies the summer she’s 18 and the entire world stops moving for a while.

 

There isn’t any amount of money that can make up for the hole he leaves. The Udaku family fortune is secure, thanks to his brilliant foresight and ironclad will. The business still prospers and T’Challa eases into the position T’Chaka had left with aplomb. But the halls of the big house are too quiet now without his deep, warm laughter. Her mother’s eyes are haunted, dark brown and brittle, set in a face crafted like fine porcelain pottery. Her brother withdraws into himself, weaving a façade around him in public but disappearing into the library for hours to read and sit in T’Chaka’s chair and sip at the expensive brandy still on his desk.

 

Shuri just pretends nothing ever happened for as long as she’s able and she works overtime at the lab until she’s so tired, she collapses like a house of cards when she comes home late at night.

 

Eventually, the way everything does, the pain stops throbbing so acutely. It’s a dull bruise on her heart and she presses it every so often just to remember that she’s still a living breathing thing and not a walking shell. But pain gets tiring. Pain is exhausting. She doesn’t want to be numb any more than she wants to ache all the time.

 

So, she writes.

 

It’s simple at first. She keeps a journal under her bed in a mahogany box she’d gotten as a birthday present when she was still a child. She pushes down old letters from old friends and little scraps of paper with sloppy markups doodled on them and places the leather-bound journal on top, easy to grab, so that when the nightmares wake her she can write what she saw and felt. She can describe the smell of smoke as the images from the television of the bombing playback in her mind like a terrible, looping video. The more she writes, the less she dreams. The less she dreams, the less she aches. She isn’t sure what she feels when her journal entries become poems, but she knows it’s not sharp, unrelenting sorrow anymore and that’s something.

.

.

.

.

It never occurs to her to put her words to music until she meets Tony Stark and then everything sort of snaps into focus and for the first time, there’s more to life than being a child prodigy, a genius, a poor little rich girl.

 

She knows _of_ him; she really doesn’t know him. Everyone knows of Tony Stark, the genius, billionaire playboy who’d inherited his father’s weapons manufacturing company and turned it on its head. There’d been the infamous kidnapping incident years ago and the slow shift from being the merchant of death to the proprietor of peace and prosperity.

****

As far as she knows, he doesn’t know her brother. He didn’t work with her father nor is he in the same circles as most of Udaku International’s top scientists and money makers. So when she meets him, she can honestly say that she knows Tony Stark all on her own, and it’s an odd reason to feel proud about something, but for whatever reason, she does.

 

There’s a conference in Manhattan and she decides to drop by on one of her rare trips outside of Wakanda and to the States. All the best and brightest will be there in New York, and were she more inclined to mingle with the world’s most brilliant minds, she’d have been a spotlight speaker or presenter. But she can’t be bothered. Not yet. She’s better, but she’s still too tired. And no one really seems in any hurry to invite her to anything. It doesn’t bother her as much as it probably should.

 

Tony Stark is, she finds out from reading the schedule of events, the person who’d gotten the entire conference off the ground. She’s surprised to find that this is his first year hosting it. The presentations and talks go smoothly and work like a well-oiled, veteran conference would. But Tony was a veteran of his field and so she’s certain he’s been planning something like this for years and years and finally decided that now was the time.

 

Shuri doesn’t quite know what to expect of him when he steps up to the podium an hour before the conference closes for lunch the first day. She knows what he looks like, sure, and has seen video of him talking in interviews or news clips, but there’s something about him that throws her off kilter when he moves to the mic and pushes it out the way. He’s quiet for a moment, presumably to allow the thunder of applause to die down, but when Shuri leans forward in her seat and lets her eyes travel the expanse of his face, she realizes he’s trying to find his bearings.

 

He’s working up the nerve to even talk and that’s startling, so she stays rooted to her seat and listens to what he says without really listening to what he’s saying. Instead, she lets the sharp, punctuated syllables of his voice travel through her skull and sink into her brain and by the time he’s done with his speech—13 minutes, six seconds, not that she’d paid attention to the timing—the cadence of his voice is almost as familiar as her own.

 

And as he steps back from the podium to allow his friend, Dr. Bruce Banner, to speak, his eyes catch hers and his smile slips for a moment until it curves back up and finally, she notes, matches his eyes.

.

.

.

.

She avoids him like the plague the next day, though she’d planned to swing through the luncheon and introduce herself if only to keep Udaku International circling around with the people who mattered. That could wait for another year, maybe another conference.

 

Tony Stark stands in the dining room with three other men and catches her eye again and she runs, like a girl, out the door and forgets about being hungry because he terrifies her and there’s nothing worse than pain except fear.

 

It’s later at night, when she’s back in her room at the Park Hyatt, that she pulls her journal out of her luggage and writes and the three lines the spring to mind bleed across the paper like blood, dark and viscous.

.

.

.

.

Tony Stark finds her on the third day, right after the last presentation. It’s rude to avoid someone, she knows, but when he spots her in the crowded throngs of scientists and biochemists and machinists, she can almost feel an invisible line tether to her finger and tug her through the bodies toward him.

 

It’s best she stays where she is than it is to run again, so she stands still and fiddles with her phone, her hands shaking ever so slightly. She feels him before she hears him or sees him, but he’s standing right beside her, almost too closely, and he’s warm, like a missile, like a red ember. He’s not sunshine. He’s a wildfire.

 

Neither of them speak at first. She looks at him as long as she can without giving anything away, and that’s when he smiles, practiced and easy, and presses a hand to his chest.

 

“I can’t believe it’s taken me three days to come over and say hello, but trust me, that’s not how I usually operate.”

 

 _I know_ , she thinks. “It’s no problem,” she says.

 

“Maybe, but still…for all the rumors you’ve probably heard, I’m not really a jackass.”

 

When her brow raises, he steps back a little and she finally feels like she can breathe some. And yet, the warmth of him makes her want to stretch out like a flower in the sun and she feels colder now that he isn’t as close.

 

“I make no assumptions,” she replies, trying for a neutral smile, but it cracks across her face strangely. It’s been a while since she’s actually done any smiling. It’s been a while since she’s done anything but pretend that she isn’t a wreck on the inside. Tony’s own smile falters until he’s not doing it anymore and it’s a relief. She doesn’t get why, not right then.

 

“I’m forever indebted,” he quips, his mouth curling into something like a smirk, and this one feels like a secret. “I can’t tell you how many people hate me and they haven’t even met me.” He doesn’t sound very upset about it. He almost relishes in it. “But then again, most people aren’t you.”

 

Shuri thinks she stops breathing for a moment, because his voice dips and his eyes darken and in the middle of a still crowded auditorium, she feels naked and exposed. She also feels something like a spark stirring in her blood and she’s both angry and stunned and that never happens to her anymore. Why is it happening now?

 

“No one is,” she says, fiercer than she means to, mostly because part of her wants him to back up further and get out of her face and leave her alone. But a very large part of her wants him to bite back, to smile at her the way he had on the podium on day one. She wants to claw at him, but in ways that don’t draw blood or ire. That scares her more than anything and she backs up on her own.

 

The further away from him she is, the colder it is and more she aches and she hates it.

 

“I’m sorry,” he says, suddenly frowning. “I hope I haven’t offended you. I just wanted-“

 

“Yes,” she breathes out, desperate to get back to the hotel and into bed and under her blankets. “I know, you wanted to know who I am. Why I’m here.” She scoffs and turns her head, her eyes lighting with some unspoken rage at the overwhelming sea of white around her. She’d been getting looks all weekend. She’d never had to bother with this back home. She should have stayed there. “Go ahead and ask me, then. I’ll tell you I have every right to be here, just like anyone.”

 

Tony doesn’t budge nor blink an eye at her little outburst and she feels her temper cool just as fast as it’d ignited.

 

“This little shindig is a lot whiter than I wanted it to be,” he says and she almost laughs.

 

“Don’t patronize me,” she blurts out, though she can tell by the look on his face that he isn’t trying to. “I’m made aware of that every time I leave home.”

 

“And I can’t relate to that. At all.” He shrugs. His honesty is a little refreshing. “I’m just saying that when I started this conference, I didn’t intend for it to look like a GOP convention.” He laughs at his own statement and stuffs his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “But it is and next year it won’t be. That’s not why I came over, though.”

 

“Why did you?” she asks.

 

“Because I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry. That while sorry doesn’t help, I know what you’re dealing with. I know how it feels.”

 

He pulls his wallet out of his pocket, tugs out a slim white card, and hunts his jacket pocket for a pen. She’s only dimly aware of all this because his sincere, quiet “I’m sorry” rings around her ears over and over.

 

_I’m sorry._

 

_I’m sorry._

 

“What are you sorry about?”

 

“Your dad.”

 

She draws in a pained breath, the images of the bombing springing forth unbidden. And she nearly falls into the seat beside her, but a strong hand reaches out and grasps her arm to keep her steady.

 

“How do you know what-“

 

“Car accident. 1991. Both of them died, actually, not just the one and…”

 

He trails off. She notes how nonchalant he tries to sound when he talks about this and she recognizes her own voice in his though his is deeper and significantly more masculine.

 

 _How’ve you been, Shuri?_ Oh, alright. Mostly. _Heard about the bombing, that’s horrible!_ Yes, it was awful. _But they say your father died instantly, and isn’t that a comfort, at least?_

 

“I didn’t get to…” She shakes her head. She doesn’t want to share this with this man, a stranger, in the middle of an auditorium. There are people watching. Tony still touches her, and she hopes to Bast he doesn’t stop because it anchors her.

 

“Yeah? Me neither.”

 

He finally finds a pen, pulls back, and she only sways a little when he does. He jots down a number and motions for her hand and she gives it to him, something she’ll remember later is the first chip in her armor. His hands are big and calloused and heavy, and his touch is burning but gentle and she almost moans at the contact.

 

“How long are you in town?” he asks her. She blinks, hard, and scrambles through the haze in her head to answer him.

 

“Till tomorrow.”

 

“That’s my personal cell. Call me tonight.”

 

And then he turns and leaves, waving toward Dr. Banner and another man she recognizes as Dr. Strange. Shuri’s whole body feels like a live wire and her hand still burns from where his had cupped hers and she holds the thin white card like it were made of glass.

.

.

.

.

It takes her three hours to work up the nerve to call him.

 

It only takes two rings for him to answer.

 

“I was only 21,” he starts, and she sinks back into the bedsheets and listens to him talk until her eyes droop and her chest stops aching and the darkness of a dreamless sleep creeps into her consciousness.

.

.

.

.

Her mother asks about her trip and she tells them the cursory details. Her brother kisses her brow and there’s a little light in his eyes when he tells her that he and Nakia have gotten back together. She says she’s happy for him, and she lays under bright woven blankets and watches old movies with Mama every other night for a few weeks.

 

She doesn’t call him again. She doesn’t forget how warm he is, though, and at night, she imagines the hand he’d touched her with creeping along the expanse of skin that only one other person has ever touched. It unsettles her and she puts this down on paper, nervous and tentative at first, until the fantasies are graphic and the paper is a menagerie of confusion and erotica. It’s a fumbling mess, too, and she doesn’t read the passages, the poetry, the confessions back again the way she does the others.

 

Tony Stark is half a world away and she’s still scared of him.

.

.

.

.

Shuri finally calls him as the second anniversary of the bombing creeps forward. She’s bored with Birnin Zana, though she’s swimming in projects, and she hates how detached his voice sounds in the videos she’s watched of him on YouTube. She wants to hear it speaking to her, the way it had the night after the conference. She wants to hear the cracks and the wavers, the breaths and gasps as he laughs at some silly thing he’d said, because laughing was so much easier to do than sobbing.

 

He picks up on the first ring this time and she bites her lip to stop from blurting out how good it felt for him to say her name.

 

“You didn’t have to disappear for two months, you know,” he teases.

 

“I know. I’ve been a little busy,” she says, and it’s not really a lie. But she’s not been so busy that she can’t call. “But it isn’t as though you don’t have my number, too.”

 

“Would you have answered?” he asks. Shuri wants to say yes. Her brain, the rational, still fearful part of her, decides that no, she wouldn’t have. And so she laughs and presses a cool palm to her flushed cheek.

 

“Probably not.”

 

It’s quiet on the line for a moment, long enough for her to hear the hitch in his breathing and to time her heartbeat. It’s faster than it was when she hit call.

 

And then he talks to her as if he’s whispering all the world’s secrets into her ear. She shudders.

 

“Did you want to talk to me about anything in particular? Or did you just wanna listen to me breathe on the line?”

 

“I don’t usually do anything without a reason,” she counters, a little annoyed that he’d called her out like that. She did want to ask him something, but she didn’t think it was good to do that on the phone. And his breaths were fine but she really just wanted to hear his honey dark voice. That was really it, and yet, she couldn’t bring herself to admit that to him.

 

“You still haven’t given me one, princess,” he says with a laugh. She doesn’t know what she likes the most; his laugh or the little nickname he’d just given her. “Don’t take that the wrong way, either. It’s just that you remind me of someone who should have a crown on her head.”

 

“I’m not sure if that’s a compliment or not,” Shuri replies. “But I’ll take it as one. And do I really need a reason?”

 

“No. I told you that you could call whenever.”

 

“There you have it. My reason, then. This is a whenever call.”

 

Tony laughs again and decides to prod her for details of what she’s been doing in her lab. It feels clandestine, almost taboo. She feels like she’s selling company secrets but nothing she’s doing is classified and probably nothing he’s interested in. He tells as much as he asks, though. It’s an even, pleasant exchange.

 

“Call me again,” he tells her, when he dismisses himself for bed. She glances at her clock and does the math and is almost ashamed that it’s so late where he is. “Hopefully sooner than two months.”

 

She promises. And she does.


	2. two

Two weeks and two days before the anniversary, she calls him in a panic because the first year, she’d been too numb to focus but this year, she feels too much all the time and she’s terrified to face this. 

 

She tells him this in a rambling, almost choked voice and he listens. He’s good at that. He’s a good talker, too, and he’s a little bit on the annoying and arrogant side sometimes, but it’s endearing. He lets her get all this out in a rush without stopping her to console her and when she thinks she’ll cry, he’s quiet until the tightness in her chest is too much and she bites down on a hard scream.

 

“Say something,” she begs him. She needs his voice again. She needs a distraction.

 

“What are you doing for the next, uh…week or two?”

 

“What?”

 

“I’ve got a meeting, and you know, normally I’d fly. But I bought a new car, and I’ve been wanting to test it out and I thought, what better way to do that than to take her on a road trip?”

 

There’s another question lingering at the end of that one and Shuri wiggles her fingers to get feeling back into them. Her hand’s gone numb from the odd angle she’s lying in.

 

“Where are you going?” she asks. She’s got to know how to pack.

 

“Los Angeles. Route 66, if I can manage it. Might stop at some of those kitschy little hotels in the desert and get lost in Vegas. Do you gamble?”

 

She snorts out a laugh and sits up as the knot in her chest unravels a little. “I have before, but only once.”

 

“Oh honey,” he purrs. “Let me teach you, then.”

.

.

.

.

Mama asks her to call when she lands in New York. She’d lied and said she was meeting with a few new friends from the conference and would be exploring the city because it was a safer option than confessing she was going to take a cross country trip with a man old enough to be her father.

 

T’Challa is too busy with Udaku International and Nakia and a bunch of other things to even pry that deeply. She gets a kiss and a hug and a request for a souvenir from the city, one she only barely remembers to fulfill when she lands at JFK. She’s surprised to see Tony waiting at the airport for her, certain he’d send a driver after her, but when he takes his shades off and smiles, she’s too overwhelmed to ask him where the help was.

 

“You look like a daisy, princess,” he greets her, kissing both her cheeks and they flame up fast and hot. She’s glad her blush doesn’t show or she’s sure he’d tease her till the end of time about it.

 

“Thank you, Tony,” she breathes out, trying hard to feel a lot more sure about herself than she is right now. “That might be the first time anyone has ever compared me to a flower.”

 

“Oh? That’s hard to believe.”

 

Shuri smiles and takes the arm he offers. “I usually get jewels,” she tells him, tossing her head a bit and it’s enough to make him laugh the way she’d been hoping it would. His laugh feels like the warm prickles of sun after a swim in the lake and she basks in it, practically preens in it. There’s a hand on the small of her back and Tony lugs her bags over his shoulders, leading her out the baggage claim and towards the pickup line.

 

The car he drives isn’t what she’d expected at all; it’s even more beautiful, gleaming black and chrome.

 

“I thought you said your car was new,” she teases, trailing her fingertips along the body, careful her nails don’t catch. Tony watches her admire the car and shoots her another secret smirk.

 

“It’s new to me.” He steps forward and opens her door, ushering her inside and she sinks into plush leather. It smells new, butter soft and camel brown, and Shuri takes a moment to inhale and let go. When he slides in beside her, she feels his eyes searching her and it burns pleasantly. There’s some  kind of energy that passes between the two of them, and when she dares to look over in his direction, he watches her as though he’s never seen anyone like her before.

 

There’s still fear, just under the surface, of what she feels when he’s around her. This is different from being on the phone and listening to shared secrets and inside jokes. She could reach over and touch him if she wanted. She’s pretty sure she wants to, until she can’t stop herself and her touches turn into something hotter and much more intimate.

 

But what scares her most is that she’s sure he wouldn’t stop her. So she presses her hands between her knees and smiles softly, waiting, until he blinks and whatever is between them falls back in line for another time.

 

“What kind of music do you like?” he asks her out of the blue. Shuri shrugs, then jerks forward a little and squeaks as he pulls out of line faster than necessary. And then, the engine smooths into something velvet and she leans back and closes her eyes as Tony maneuvers out of the airport and onto the freeway.

 

“A little of everything,” she finally says, breathlessly, and he laughs. His hands are rough and heavy when he reaches over and touches her knee, and through the fabric of her thin jeans, she shivers.

.

.

.

.

He gives her control of the radio and tells her to point out places she wants to visit on their cross-country trip. And though she’s seen maps of the States numerous times, it doesn’t dawn on her how absolutely gigantic America is until it’s been six hours and they’re not even out of Pennsylvania yet.

 

The brat in her complains and the asshole in Tony scoffs and tells her to catch the next flight back home. And then he laughs and she laughs and she settles back into the plush leather, grips the bottom of her seat, and swings her legs in tune with the Afro-house playing through the speakers.

 

This is how it goes for a few states. They drive for hours and rest at little hotels with silly names, two beds a room, where Shuri stays up way too late and stares at Tony as he sleeps. He wakes her in the mornings with a soft nudge and brings her waffles or peanut butter crackers for breakfast as she brushes her teeth with bleary eyes. He never asks her to drive and she never suggests it. She’s content to hang her feet out the window and sing along to the radio and he seems happy to coast along the open highway—interstate be damned, he almost always hits the old, patched two lane blacktop in the sticks.

 

There is still that strange, thrumming current between the two of them, but it’s mostly pushed under for extensive discussion on chaos theory and physics and whether Bob Seger was better than Bruce Springsteen or not. Shuri honestly had no idea; she’d never given much attention to American rock music. And then Tony’s face lights up and he pulls over at a gas station for snacks and a pee break in Kentucky.

 

“I need to take you to Memphis. I mean, I know I said you could pick the waypoints—”

 

“I still have no idea where I want to go that isn’t Los Angeles and Las Vegas.”

 

He snorts and parks the car at pump 2, groaning a bit as he gets out and cracks his neck and back. He’s not wearing a jacket in the heat of the mid-afternoon and the soft grey t-shirt that stretches across his broad shoulders is wrinkled and damp from sweat. Shuri bites her tongue and clenches her fist at the flex of his muscles as he starts the pump, or the sheen of his skin in the sunshine.

 

It should be strange how absolutely attracted to him she is, but it isn’t. He’s more than double her age, but he’s incredibly handsome, streaks of silver in his dark hair and bits of white in his beard. And though he’s not that much taller than she is, he’s a built in ways she didn’t think a tech nerd and science geek would be. She wonders what he looks like without that shirt on. She sucks in air and imagines him stripped to his expensive jeans, the top button opened, his cognac eyes boring into her own as he drags his fingertips up the length of her calves.

 

And then his head lifts and he catches her eyes and her heartbeat stutters.

 

“Are you gonna stare at me all day or go get your snacks like I said?”

 

He looks like he knows exactly what she was thinking about and she gets the impression he doesn’t object and her chest flares with heat.

 

Shuri knows she’ll stammer if she says anything now, so she grunts and swings the door open, walking into the cool, near empty gas station on wobbly legs. There’s an old man in the corner sipping coffee and talking to a woman in uniform. The clerk leans against the shelf of cigarettes on his phone and a little boy flits back and forth between coolers of soda and juice as his mother chats on her cell, bags of chips in hand. No one pays her much attention, except the clerk, who glances up quickly and nods his head.

 

Shuri nods back, grabs some snack cakes and beef jerky, and wanders over to the drinks, avoiding bumping into the little boy by only a hair. His mother grumbles and snatches him up quickly, apologizing absentmindedly, but Shuri brushes it aside and smiles, earning a giggle and a wave.

 

The bell of the door dings again and Tony comes in and she shifts her snacks, wiggles her toes in her sandals, and tries ignoring the ache between her thighs.

 

“Oooh, you got me a Slim Jim.” He flicks the plastic casing of the jerky and his breath brushes her neck. She nearly drops what she’s holding and her body goes rigid as his hand trails along her waist, around the small of her back, and then grasps one of the belt loops of her jeans. She’d picked a fine day to wear a semi cropped top, she thinks. Her body is going haywire and he’s taking an inordinate amount of pleasure in the reactions—little goosebumps sprinkle her arms and her pulse jumps in her throat.

 

“Tony,” she starts, her voice wavering only a little. It’s low enough that he’s the only one that could hear her. And she’s grateful that no one else seems to be paying them any attention still. She doesn’t quite understand what he’s doing, but she doesn’t want him to stop as much as she wants him to give her a break.

 

“I usually drink beer with a Slim Jim,” he continues, ignoring her soft plea. His fingers are almost touching her skin again, still looped in her waistband. He tugs her backward, a sharp, imperceptible motion that has her stumbling back and flush against his chest. He breathes in deep and she does too, cool artificial air and the smell of grease and fried food from the deli. Tony’s mouth is right next to her ear, and she’s almost melting at how hot he is, how solid his body feels against her back. She shifts from one foot to the other, brushing her ass against him without even trying and he hisses.

 

“Do you want me to take you to Memphis?” he whispers.

 

“Is that an innuendo?” she asks, eyes fluttering closed as she turns her head toward him and the breath on her face smells like coffee and wintermint gum. It’s even hotter than his body is. She wants it between her thighs, ghosting over her trembling skin.

 

When he laughs, she barely hears it but she feels it. It rumbles from his chest and out his body into hers, until it sinks down into the fire that’s blazing in her belly. Shuri thinks she moans. She’s got half a mind to be ashamed that he’s doing this in the middle of a gas station but she doesn’t care anymore. If he’d wanted to have her right against the beer cooler, she’d let him.

 

“It’s whatever you want it to be, sweetheart.”

 

Tony pulls away like slow taffy, taking his time, then meanders down the rows of coolers to where the sodas are. He grabs two Dr. Pepper and a Fanta orange.

 

“I can’t have beer if I’m driving.”

 

He waits, cooler still open and she has to catch her breath and calm her heart down before she can take the bait.

 

“I can’t drink yet. Not here, I can’t.”

 

His grin, half cocked and boyish, curls against one side of his lovely mouth and Shuri turns around abruptly to pay for what she’s got in her arms.

 

It’s only when she gets to the counter that she realizes she's punctured a hole in her Barbeque Lays.

.

.

.

.

“Don’t I need a driver’s license for this?” she asks, somewhere outside the town’s city limits. She’d taken a few backroads to get the feel of the Mustang and had almost moaned at how beautifully the thing drove. Tony watched her the entire time, a little mix of anxiety and what she hoped was arousal on his face. He clutched his beer with unnecessary force. She’d gripped the steering wheel so hard she thought her fingerprints were embedded into the leather cover.

 

“You do, but no one is gonna ask you for one if you don’t get pulled over.” He shifts forward to connect his phone to the stereo system and she glances over, counts the freckles that dot his bare forearms, and then back to the empty, open highway. The stop sign glints like a wet cherry, swaying in the warm breeze that had cropped up between the gas station and the highway. “Try to drive the speed limit, at least through these little towns.”

 

“Yes sir,” she purrs, slightly irritable because she does know how to drive and there are speed limits back home. She’s not ignorant to American road rules. She won’t tell him she’d done some research in Indiana on the off chance that he’d let her behind the wheel. “I’ll try to be good.”

 

Tony’s brow raises just enough so that she knows her comment had struck something in him. She smirks and pulls out of the side street with flourish, shifting gears with ease and leaning back against the torque.

 

There’s just the radio and Tony’s light chatter and the rush of the wind as Shuri flies through small towns and eventually is forced onto the interstate. She’d enjoyed the quiet, almost desolate nature of the two lane, but there’s no way to Memphis without getting to on I-40. She’s never driven on an interstate before and just from the McDonald’s they stop at for her to catch her bearings and grab some late lunch, she’s sure this will be a far more taxing endeavor than going 60 on a US Highway.

 

Tony presses his hand to the small of her back, two fingers in the fabric of her top and the other two spread across her skin while his thumb curls against her muscle, and little ripples of pleasure and want pass across her body. He feels them, too, because he pauses long enough to just watch her, to assess what he’s doing. There’s no smirk this time, only a glint of understanding in his eyes and he looks hungry.

 

“Do you want me to drive?”

 

She swallows. She does, but she doesn’t at the same time. She’s afraid to admit she’s afraid because there’s trucks the size of a small building barreling over the bridge by the exit and so many cars rushing back and forth and the speed limit is much faster than she’s ever had to drive.

 

But the rush that passes through her at the thought of driving that highway, of making the Mustang purr and watching Tony’s eyes sparkle as she handles his car with precision makes her shake her head. It’s hesitant, a little bit unsure initially, but she gains confidence the more she thinks about doing this. She can do this; she’s done things much more harrowing than drive an interstate highway before.

 

“If I want to pull over, I’ll say something.”

 

He pats her back with a nod and slips into the passenger seat once more, pulling his shades down and taking a sip of his chocolate shake. There’s a bundle of nerves in her belly and she doesn’t think she could even start on her chicken nuggets right now, so she decides to just get this over with and do it.

 

Her hands shake, but her resolve doesn’t. She takes her time on the incline toward the interstate, merging with her breath held and her shoulders rigid and straight. Tony keeps mostly quiet except to encourage her to keep going.

 

“Get your speed up, honey,” he says, his voice tethering her to the car and to the road so that she doesn’t lose her mind and drift off into the fast lane and get pummeled by a tractor trailer. “You’ve got this. Slip in behind that van, there’s enough space.”

 

Shuri doesn’t let out the breath she’s holding until she’s a mile down the road and going 75 with the top down doesn’t make her stomach cramp up nearly as much.

 

After that, it’s mostly a straight shot. There’s another two hours or so till they hit Memphis. Tony puts on John Lee Hooker and introduces her to the blues, giving her a cursory education on the history behind the music and the power that flowed from it.

 

“We’ll go to Beale Street and see what’s happening down that way,” he tells her. “Kind of sucks that we missed Memphis in May, but they’ve always got someone playing at the clubs. And there’s Graceland.” The light is waning and the air is cooler, enough that she shivers. Tony wraps his jacket around her shoulders as she drives and reaches behind them to pull the roof up.

 

“This isn’t going to screw up your schedule, is it?”

 

Tony scoffs and shakes his head. “Nah. We’ve got plenty of time to get to California and besides, they’ll wait for me to get there if they know what’s good for them.” The sudden shift from open air to the warmth of the car with no wind almost throws her off and she wiggles in her seat a little, readjusting her hold on the steering wheel.

 

“I keep forgetting you’re the boss,” she quips, and he laughs. “You can do whatever you want.”

 

“Can I?”

 

“There’s no real restrictions. You don’t have a real schedule. You take time off to drive across this enormous country to get to a meeting when you could have simply flown at anytime.”

 

Another shrug, and he leans back in his seat, his fingers folded beneath his chin. “Maybe. But what’s the cost of that sort of privilege? What do I have to give up to get to that point, once in a while, where I can run off and do whatever I want because I want to?” His sigh is tired and a little frustrated. “Industry never sleeps, not the one I’m in. I run a multi billion dollar company and employ thousands of people who stick with me and make the most of my weird schedule and to keep things that way, I stay up some nights and push myself until the next big thing comes and there’s another guaranteed pay raise that quarter.”

 

“I’m not saying you’re lazy, Tony,” she says by way of explanation. “I just…my Baba raised us on a strict schedule. We ate and slept and worked and went to school at set times everyday for all our lives because dawdling and doing something just for the fun of it was frivolous and wasteful.” She thinks of her father, and how much she’d loved him and juxtaposes that with the very strict and very stern man he could be sometimes. It’s glaring.

 

“Did it work?”

 

“It did. Can’t say if that’s a good or bad thing, though.”

 

“Maybe I need better structure and you just need to let your hair down, so to speak.”

 

The exit to Memphis rushes toward them. A mile and a quarter. She glances behind her in the mirrors and slips into the far right lane when the traffic is clear. Shuri turns to him as she slows from 75 to 55 and onto the ramp that’ll take them right to the heart of the city. It’s dark and lights glitter in the distance and she feels the stiffness in her body from sitting for too long without a break.

 

“I suppose that’s what I’m doing now,” she finally says, and he gazes at her for so long that she thinks the feel of it on her body is embedded in her flesh now.

 

She’s almost sad when he actually looks ahead and toward the road.

 


	3. three

The La Quinta they stay in isn’t luxury by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a lot better than some of the spots they’d been in on the drive thus far. When she asks, after tossing her bag into her bed and knocking on the door that joined his room and hers, he insists it’s part of the experience.

****

“I call it an adventure,” he quips, a towel slung over his shoulder and a bottle of water in hand. “Would you rather pass through this country in shiny, bright five stars or get down into the heart of it by slipping through a two or three star one?”

****

“I’d rather my own suite, actually,” she retorts, but she has to admit there’s a charm to the hominess of the places they’ve stayed. There’s something freeing about driving like that too, instead of relying on first class or a private jet. It feels organic. She flops down on the bed and stretches her legs out and Tony takes a seat beside her, his warmth reaching out and radiating toward her like sunrays.

****

“I don’t know, it just reminds me of being a kid. Mom and I took a road trip together. And maybe I didn’t grow up quite the way most kids do, maybe I didn’t have the best parents, but it wasn’t all terrible.”

****

“Was this before your surgery?” She waves her hand toward his clothed chest where he’s told her he has a long scar from heart valve repair done at ten. When she’d asked him why he’d never bothered getting it fixed, he’d been quiet.

****

_ Not everything needs to be. _

****

“Nah, this was...oh, three or four years after? It was right before I left for college.”

****

Tony slips the towel off his shoulder and folds it for something to do with his hands. Shuri leans back, anticipating another one of his stories, and watches as water droplets still drip from his damp hair to his neck. She wants to reach up and brush them away, suck the water into her mouth and kiss his skin. 

****

“So I was 14. Mom had just gotten the okay to travel after the breast cancer went into remission and she wanted to celebrate. Maybe she just wanted to feel like one of the living instead of the could be dead.” He shrugs and tries to keep his tone level, the way he does when he talks about his mother. But by the end of this story she knows she’ll hear a crack in his voice and he’ll fight to keep from laughing or crying or both. 

****

“Where’d the two of you go?” she asks him. She leans a little further into him and sighs softly when he shifts to follow her. “California?”

****

Tony smiles. “It was the wildest thing I think either of us had done. Just me, her, and her ‘70 Mercury. We took off from the old house in the Upper East Side and pulled out a map of Route 66 and just let the road take us wherever it would.”

****

He tells her about their trip, a one month meandering adventure that had seen Maria and Tony getting lost and changing flat tires and sleeping in the car on the side of the road a few times. He’d laughed when he told her about stopping to go swimming in a cow pond, gotten quiet as his mother had made a pay phone call back home and cried as Howard had told her getting lost in Kansas was her fault, and then mused wistfully about their drive through the desert while Frank Sinatra and Billie Holliday played on cassette. He didn’t cry, not this time, but by the end of his story he was curled up in bed facing her, his head on her pillow and his fingers entwined with her own.

****

It’s the most intimate thing she’d ever done with anyone.

****

She falls asleep with the sound of his voice, raspy from talking all day, thick with nostalgia and a little regret. When she wakes, the bed is empty and she buries her face into the pillows for the lingering scent of him.

.

.

.

.

Beale Street is remarkably quiet in the morning and early afternoon but Tony promises it’ll be live and popping that evening. So he takes her out to lunch and then they go to Graceland, though neither of them care much at all about Elvis. It’s overrated for the price they pay to get in, but it’s something to do, and at the end of the tour, she ends up with a tacky little Elvis tee shirt that she knows would be adorable with her black skinnies and some combat boots.

****

They go shopping, too, because while she’d packed plenty of clothes for a two week trip, she doesn’t have anything she’d feel comfortable wearing to a bar. 

****

“You’d look a million bucks in  _ rags _ , sweetheart,” he tells her, his tone teasing and light and it’s probably the millionth time he’s made her giggle today, but she can’t help it. He walks beside her down the street proudly and twirls her around as she comes out of the dressing rooms of the little boutiques. And when she finally finds the dress, he lets out a low whistle and his hand rests on the curve of her hip when he pulls her close.

****

“Gorgeous,” he breathes, and she feels like it and then some.

****

They take dinner at Silky O’Sullivan’s, laughing over ribs and fries, and she has her first taste of crown and coke from his glass as their meal ends. It’s bitter, a little on the strong side for her tastes, but it reminds her of Tony’s eyes and so she plucks an ice cube covered in liquor and soda and sucks it down to nothing, wishing it were his fingers that rest on the table and tap her own every so often.

****

The motion builds up, adds on and stokes the fire inside her, so by the time they’re done with dinner and down the street, she’s feeling a lot more frisky than she’d been when they left the hotel. Tony’s cautious about getting her into any of the bars or speakeasy’s since she’s only 20, but it’s a laid back town and a loose night; she gets past the security just by trailing behind Tony and flashing a sweet smile. They ease in and sip sodas and more whiskey while a hard rock band plays cover songs up front. Tony sneaks her a bit of his alcohol when she asks, though he cuts her off when she starts to sway outside in the hot night. 

****

“I’m not carrying you back to La Quinta,” he declares, and she laughs because he looks so serious about it. But she takes the water and bar nuts he pushes at her at the next bar, and stops flirting with the bartender at the nightclub down the street for free drinks so he doesn’t get too mad.

****

It’s when they’re in the Sound Lounge does the mood of the entire evening shift. At first, she’s fine; there’s blues coming from the stage and the lively, thumping beat makes Shuri wiggle around on the dancefloor, first with Tony and then with total strangers. He watches her while he sits at the table and nurses his fifth whiskey for the night, eyes glimmering in the smoky, hazy light. She thinks maybe he’s a little jealous. She grins and holds out her hands for him to come dance again.

****

“Nah, you look like you’re having fun all by your lonesome,” he says dryly, gesturing toward the three guys who’d been hovering around her like wolves, waiting for a second of her time. It was a heady feeling and she chased it like a drug, but with Tony glaring at her that way and the sharp, sarcastic lilt to his voice, she didn’t want to play with the little boys anymore. She wanted him.

****

“But I’m not,” she whines, and she sways over toward him, grabbing both his hands and pulling him out his chair. He sighs deeply and moves with her, though not with some small resistance and the song shifts from the thudding, heavy beat to something slow and sticky, like syrup or honey. Tony’s hands find her waist and her hands flitter along his shoulders, broad and strong and flexing beneath her hands. He’s oddly quiet as they dance and it almost bothers her enough to say something about it, but the intensity behind his stare thrills her.

****

“What are you trying to do?” he asks. She knows, but she’s not sure if she’s ready to say just yet. Instead, she draws in a deep breath-- _ him _ , mingled with heat and liquor--and leans up on her tiptoes and brushes her mouth against his, soft at first, unsure.

****

He stops swaying, barely moves, doesn’t even breathe. Shuri presses further. He doesn’t stop her so she sighs against his mouth and opens herself to him and he moves then, finally, wrapping his arm tight around her waist and pulling her flush against his chest. She can hear her pulse racing in her ears and feel his heart beating like a hammer in his body and the music is a sultry cacophony of sound and vibration as he lifts her from her feet just enough that her toes no longer scrape the hardwood floor.

****

He tastes so good. He tastes like the alcohol he’d been drinking, like wintermint, like warmth and spice from the barbeque sauce. She inhales him as his tongue presses into her mouth and he consumes her, the arm not wrapped around her pressing her hips into his and she can feel how bad he wants her through his jeans and her dress. She moans, just loud enough that he can hear, and pulls back a bit to catch his eyes and they scare her enough that she freezes solid.

****

But then someone is whistling and she darts her eyes around to see the crowd of people watching them, watching her, and Tony’s arms around her loosen as he pushes her back and away. He flushes red and his face goes blank before he turns and gives the crowd a slick, phony smile. It’s plastic and she hates it and cold travels down her chest and through her body to her toes.

****

He barely says a word to her on their trek down the street. She trails behind him slowly, glimmering street lights blurring with the marquees and the headlights of the motorcycles parked outside.

****

“Tony.”

****

He pauses and lets her catch up to him and when he looks at her, she feels like she’s broken something. Her lips feel like they’ve been scorched and her body vacillates between panic and want.

****

“You’re drunk, Shuri,” he says quietly, too quietly. She doesn’t have the heart to argue that she’s mostly sober and she knows she wants him because it’s apparent he’s too afraid of her to do anything about what he wants. He doesn’t touch her again and when the door to her hotel room locks behind her, she curls up beneath the covers and cries herself to sleep.

.

.

.

.

Her lips still burn when she wakes the next morning, but she doesn’t say anything about the kiss, and neither does he. It’s almost as if there’s a set back in the progression of their relationship. She hates it. She wants to go back to flirting in Patty’s Grocery in Elkton, or strolling Beale with him so close she could hold his hand if she wanted. She wants to go back to grinding on him in the dark bar, and the feel of his heartbeat under her palm when the liquor swirled around in her body and made her tip toe up and press her lips to his.

 

She goes to sit in the Mustang instead of take her fruit and waffle with him in the hotel and looks up flights out of Memphis back to Birnin Zana.

 

But the longer she searches the more she realizes she doesn’t want to leave, though the air between them is thick and tense and Tony gives her so much space, it’s as if he’d dropped a canyon there. He drives out of Memphis and back toward California. He keeps the conversation superficial, the radio on loud, and his hands to himself. And it’s a loss that eats away at the freeing feeling she’d come to cherish being on the open road.

 

Her father’s death looms closer with every mile marker and every hour and she’s terrified she’s fucked up something with Tony. Shuri crawls down into the leather seat and burrows like a small animal, wrapping a blanket around her and sleeps so she doesn’t have to think.

 

Oklahoma City is forty miles away and the Mustang need gas, so Tony pulls into a gas station off of I-40 and fills the tank. Shuri wakes from her nap and stretches out in the warm dark car, the radio low in the background and Tony’s jacket beneath her head. She didn’t remember rolling it up for a pillow. She almost smiles at the thought of him cushioning her rest in spite of the weird vibe that still lingers. 

****

When he hands her a bag of barbeque Lays and offers her a hint of a smile, the tension eases enough that she doesn’t feel like she’s going to scream.

****

It’s not what she wants, not yet. But it gets them out of Oklahoma, and it’ll have to do.

.

.

.

. 

Her mother calls halfway between Oklahoma City and Santa Fe.

 

“How’s your trip going, Bibi?” she asks, and Shuri tells her only the barest lie she can think of.

 

“Fun, Mama! I’ve been shopping a lot and seeing the city.” She covers the phone with her hand so the sound of the hustle and bustle outside the truck stop don’t filter through. If Ramonda asks, maybe she can say she’s in Times Square and the traffic is loud.

 

“Oh good, I was worried. You haven’t been online much and your messages are so short.”

 

“Just been busy, is all. We’ve got museums to roam through today, so, I may not be on much either. But I’ll try and remember not to keep you in the dark.”

 

“And take pictures!” her mother says, and Shuri groans internally because she didn’t think of that when she’d left. She promises to show them all when she gets home and makes a mental note to snap a few photos before her plane leaves. Maybe she can take a day off in New York just for that. And then her mother coaxes her into talking for longer than she’d intended until Shuri admits that yes, she’s a little tired and yes, she misses home.

 

But even after she hangs up she thinks about the lie she’s pushing. How many people her age did she know took off on cross country road trip with middle aged billionaires? She likes to imagine it’s the residual grief and loneliness from Baba’s death. But loneliness might not really explain the impulse she has to do rash, uncharacteristic things; nor will it explain the tense energy that still thrums between she and Tony. He’s all fire and heat and he stalks her like prey, even in the small things, like switching seats in the car or who pumps gas or what bed to take at the hotel.

 

And then, they’re in the Arizona desert and gas is low and she’s so tired from an eight hour stretch that she insisted she could handle. Her nerves are shot, and so is Tony’s because he’s snappish and ruder than she thinks she could deal with. She moves around him with sluggish, angry movements and hauls her overnight bag out the car, squinting at the little motel, some old fashioned kitschy place with pink walls and neon signs that flash vacancy. She has no idea why he picked this one. They’re close enough to the Grand Canyon that he could have had her stop at a nice Holiday Inn.

 

But she’s too tired to fight about it. She’s tired of his thick silence and his glancing, blazing looks. She’s tired of wishing his hands weren’t pressed firmly in his lap the entire eight hours and were along the back of her seat like always or brushing against her elbow when he told her stories.

 

Tony goes into the little office to get them a room or two; he comes out with a blank expression and one key.

 

“Room’s only got one bed.”

 

She blinks in the dusk of the Arizona night sky and shivers as the temperature steadily drops. It’s cold at night in the desert and she hadn’t dressed for that, her shorts and tee exposing her limbs to the chill.

 

“I’ll sleep in the car, then,” she declares, picking her bag up and heading back to the Mustang parked right out front. But Tony grasps her arm—the most he’s touched her in what feels like forever but has been only two and a half days—and stops her short.

 

“It’s my car. If anyone needs to sleep in it, it should be me.”

 

She makes a noise in the back of her throat, something crossed between a growl and a sigh, and thinks of shrugging his hand off her elbow, but the warmth of his hand is welcoming outside in the air. Before she can tell him that she’d rather sleep in the Mustang than have him hold that against her for the rest of the trip, he pulls her closer and then towards the motel again, over where their room waits.

 

“Sleep in the motel, Shuri. Fuck.”

 

It’s the grumble of a man barely holding it together. He looks as strung out as she feels. She can feel her toes starting to cramp as she fights back the overwhelming urge to lean up and kiss him the way she had on Beale Street. And her body, traitorous and treacherous, tells her that she needs to because his kisses tastes like life and she’s tired of feeling only partly alive.

 

But her brain wins this round and she’s left bereft and almost empty in the tiny motel room. The single bed sits in the middle of a cool, but clean old room with dated fixtures and a TV from the stone ages. Shuri slides into the adjacent chair instead of plopping down onto the bed because she’s not even sure if the mattress is worth sleeping in. Maybe she’ll take the floor. She digs her blanket out her bag, searches for her pajamas, and comes up short.

 

She hadn’t stopped at the laundromat the other day like she said she would. She’ll have to sleep in her clothes again and the thought makes her whine out something high pitched and reedy.

 

The shower, thank Bast, is hot, and the towel looks mostly clean. It’s half past 10 pm before her stomach rumbles again, but she’s out of breakfast bars, too, though there’s some more Slim Jims and a half can of Pringles in the car.

 

Tony’s in the car, though and she’s scared of pissing him off again. And then she’s mad that she cares if he’s pissed or not. Why is she scared of him so when she has no real reason to be?

 

Resolve spurs her outside in her shorts and tee, but with the blanket draped around her shoulders. Dust gathers under her flip flops and curl across her toes and she shakes off the shudder that starts because it’s 40 degrees out and it’s dark beyond the gaudy neon sign that flashes every few seconds.

 

The Mustang’s windows are foggy. Shuri frowns and slows her steps, moving around the car to see what the issue is. From the driver’s side, she can see something moving; Tony, she assumes, is probably shifting around in the car, maybe getting dressed. She can wait, she supposes. But a minute passes, and then another and the breeze is bothering her, so she marches over to the passenger side to open the door. 

****

It’s locked and someone shouts and the window is clear enough at the bottom that she can see. And she realizes that he’s not exactly naked, but he isn’t decent either. He’s got his hands covering his crotch and the wildest expression his face. Her brain, frazzled and hungry, slowly puts two and two together and she watches that hand move up again, as Tony slides the window down a crack.

****

“What do you want?”

****

He sounds so angry about it. He looks terrified or strung out or both. She realizes his voice sounds like the voice of a man desperate for something. She wonders if that desperation has anything to do with her and it makes her stomach knot up but her cunt throbs.

****

“I’m hungry,” she starts, sounding lost, and she shakes her head and huffs because no one told him to take the car and no one told him to jack off in it when he could have taken the motel and did that in the shower. She can’t meet his eyes. Hers are stuck on his hand and the faint outline of his dick and she’s shocked to find that he hasn’t stopped moving.

****

Though, the more she thinks about it, she’s not that shocked. He’s a bold one, always had been. And so she doesn’t care anymore if she’d interrupted. 

 

“I want my Pringles,” she says, and Tony groans, shaking his head. 

****

“I’m fuckin’ busy, Shuri, Jesus fuck!”

****

“I don’t give a shit!” she says, angry that he’s acting like she’s at fault for him not getting an orgasm when he’d wanted. All he’d have to do is hand her the chips and let her flip flop back to the motel room, but she knows he knows she’d lie in that old bed under the thin, dusty sheets and think about what he’s doing in the car. And that excites her. She digs her nails into her thighs and forcers her eyes to look into his. They’re wild. She feels like kissing him and hitting him all at the same time.

****

“You act like you’re scared of me or something,” he prods, his voice thick with desire and pent up frustration. He stops the movements of his hand and leans up until she’s sure he’ll snatch her through the window and into the car. 

 

“I’m not scared of you!” she screeches, though her belly quakes, both in heated want and absolute fear. And yet, the fear mingles with the arousal and she’s so turned on she thinks she’ll keel over. “You’re nothing to be afraid of.”  _ Not anymore _ , she wants to add, but he doesn’t really need to know that she’d ever been scared of him to begin with.

 

“Then why are you still standing there outside the damn car?” he asks, shifting his hips up and she watches as his cock, still hard and glistening in the glow of the motel vacancy sign, brushes across his bare belly. She licks her lips and catches his eyes, and he’s literally begging her to do something about it. Another breeze, dustier than the last and colder, makes up her mind for her. That, and the way his breath catches as he stares her up and down.

 

She opens the passenger door and slips in quickly so she doesn’t change her mind. It’s a welcome relief inside, where it’s warm and Tony’s pants have fogged up the glass a bit. Shuri reaches out and scratches her fingertips across the condensation, stalling, until his hands grip her hips and tug her bodily over to his lap, plops her right down on top of him, and traps his erection between the two of them.

 

This close up, it’s even more overwhelming, but the curious nature that overrides her good sense and had gotten her this far prompts her to reach out and touch.

 

He’s so hot. He’s hard and heavy and the head of it is sticky and slick with precum and probably spit. A little part of her wants to lean down and put her mouth on him, but there’s not much room in the car like this to do that. Instead, she lifts her eyes to his and lets him put his hand over hers and with a slow downward stroke, she twists and begins to stroke him.

 

When he groans, her cunt clenches around nothing and she’s a little mad he’s not filling her body instead of her hand. But his grip is unrelenting. He moves faster and so does she and he’s filthy when he finally talks, arching his back a little when she squeezes harder.

 

“Can you make your pussy do that?” he asks her, breathless and red and sweating.

 

“Wouldn’t you love to find out?” she murmurs and he grins, then moans, his hips moving in time with their joined hands. Shuri bites her lip and leans forward, her free hand grasping his hair and tugging his head back. She brushes her lips across his throat where his Adam’s apple bobs and his pulse dances in an offbeat staccato. Her thumb pushes up and across the head of him and he hisses when she bites down, not caring about the spit that pools across his collarbone.

 

Shuri soothes the kiss with her tongue, nips at his jawline and nuzzles the hairs of his beard. And he lets her hand go and reaches up behind him, grasping the head rest as she strokes him harder and licks the skin of his throat. There isn’t much warning when he cums, just a deep grunt and then there’s warmth spreading over her hand and dripping down her knuckles.

 

She pulls back and leans against the steering wheel. Tony sucks in deep breath after deep breath and his eyes are hazy as he reaches toward her. He pulls her close, ignoring the mess between them and nuzzles his nose across hers, brushing his lips along her bottom one before he pulls her into his mouth and kisses her like he’s drowning.

 

Shuri’s entire body is a cinder when he pulls away and she fists the sleeves of his shirt, closing her eyes while neon flashes behind her lids. They say nothing. They don’t move. They sit like that, cum cooling on his belly and her hand and the windows fogged for long minutes until Tony grasps her hips and pulls her up to check himself out.

 

“I don’t imagine you’ll want this all over your blanket, huh?”

 

She makes a face and he laughs, tugging his shirt off to wipe himself down as best as he’s able.

 

“Why don’t you just come in and shower?”

 

“I didn’t wash any PJ's,” he says, though maybe he’s not nearly as annoyed by that prospect as she’d been. She realizes she’s not annoyed, either. Not anymore. There’s a shift as he pushes her gently off his lap and grasps her hand to wipe it, too, but it’s going to need more than a soggy tee shirt to get her clean.

 

“I don’t suppose we’ll really need any,” she says. Tony pauses his ministrations and opens his mouth to say something, but for a moment, nothing comes out. And then he presses his lips together and decides on something, she thinks, that he’s probably been going back and forth on for as long as they’ve been on the road.

 

“I guess I do owe you.”

 

“Hmm, yeah.” Shuri rubs her legs together and moans a little when the denim presses against he aching core. “I could handle it myself, but…”

 

“Why should you?” he asks, the fire in his eyes nearly all consuming. “I’ve got a mouth and two hands and a working dick, if you want it.”

 

Shuri flushes from toe to tip and smothers it by grabbing him for another kiss, this one sloppy and breathless.

 

“I want it.”

 

“The dick?”

 

“Duh.” She snorts out a laugh and lets her hand drift down his bare chest, fingertips ghosting over the long scar that runs in between. “Unless you’d rather not.”

“Rather not what? Fuck you?” Tony throws the door to the car open and shoots her a look that could only be described as incredulous. “Honey, I’d give my kingdom to fuck you.”


	4. four

Tony’s skin tastes like brine, sweat still clinging to his bare chest and shoulders. Shuri falls back onto the bed and brings him with her and moans like a starving woman when he covers her with his body. He’s solid, all muscle and steel, and the lines in his face deepen as he grins and grinds his hips into hers. He’d stripped her bare and tugged his pants off and there was nothing between them now, just the hesitation of whether or not she really wanted to take the plunge and do this.

 

“We don’t have to,” he promises her, in a quiet voice unlike anything she’s heard before. He’s earnest in his declaration, and his eyes watch her for any signs of discomfort as his hands stroke her skin. She shakes her head and buries her face into his neck and kisses him, delighting in the quivers his body gives when she touches him. And she loves to touch him. He’s burning, practically incinerating, but he feels so good. He feels whole and heavy and here and she drags her heels up the backs of his legs to his ass to urge him forward.

 

“I want to.”

 

“Okay. Alright. But uh…how many times have you done this?”

 

Shuri rolls her eyes and wiggles her hips impatiently. He’s dragged his tongue around every inch of her body except where she’d wanted it the most but she’d forgiven that if only because he seemed ripe and ready to pin her down into the bed and sink inside her deep and hard.

 

“Enough times. Why?”

 

He looks so cute with his eyes wide and his mouth searching for words. “Because I don’t…I mean, I’m not sure if you would have wanted me to…you know.”

 

“Tony.”

 

“Yeah, sweetheart.”

 

“C’mere.” She pulls him down and kisses him hotly, heavy breaths rushing between them as her body throbs with need and his hands dig into her hips. Shuri hopes he leaves bruises. She wants him to mark her with more than his cum. “I would’ve been perfectly happy with having you as my first,” she says, and he smiles, and she thinks he’s one of the most beautiful people she’s ever seen. “But don’t worry about that. I’m not new to this.”

 

“Okay.”

 

“And that’s alright, yeah?”

 

He kisses her again and parts her thighs wider, lines himself up with her heat, and slides his cock between her wet lips to coat the condom. “It’s fine. I don’t care. I want you now.”

 

At her urging he pushes forward, smoothly, a single thrust inside her that’s deep and fluid and it feels as though something in her has become unlocked. She groans in pleasure at the thickness of him, and whimpers at the length of him, and when he pulls back and the thick head of him drags through her and almost out, she lifts her knees to take him even deeper when he pushes back in.

 

If he was a dirty talker when he’d gotten a hand job in the Mustang, he’s absolute filth in bed. He showers her in kisses and touches every inch he can grasp and tells her in graphic detail just how good she feels wrapped around him. And Shuri drinks it down like good wine because it feels good and she hasn’t felt good like this in a long time.

 

“So fuckin’ pretty,” he grunts, pushing her thighs back further. “ _Goddamn_ you feel so good. So tight. _Fuck_.”

****

She moans wantonly and wraps her body around him tighter, whispering his name over and over as he shifts his hips back and up and then faster, until she can feel something hard and heavy building between her legs and spreading through her limbs. She arches her back when the pleasure spikes to a point that her breaths come out rushed and her body shakes as he holds and fucks her and nips at the skin of her throat.

****

Tony flips her over then, suddenly, and growls like an animal, his hair a mess and his face flushed with exertion. “I’m gonna cum too fast if I don’t switch,” he pants by way of explanation. She’s never had that happen before. She grins and settles astride him, maneuvering so that his cock angles in just the right way as he pushes his hips up and she meets him. And she cries out so loudly she’s sure she’ll wake the neighbors, if they have any, or the little old man in the manager’s office.

****

Shuri can’t be bothered to give a damn.

****

Her nails pinion into his sides and she rides him hard and fast, eyes closed as her orgasm spirals up and up, twisting in a coil so tight it’s almost painful. Tony tightens his arms around her body and sits up so he can lave his tongue across her nipples, and she stammers out something that sounds like his name as she cums, hard and so intense, she can’t make heads or tails of who either of them are. Tony pushes her through it, praise spilling from his mouth and he grasps her hips and shifts her again, until they’re laying on their sides and he’s nose to nose with her, eyes open and dark with need.

****

“Cum for me again,” he orders. There is no argument in his tone, stern and unyielding, and he slides sweaty, trembling fingers to her clit and strokes her hard and rough. Shuri’s chest burns and her body feels as though she’ll crack into little sharp pieces but she’s close again, already, and so she nods and bows her head to his shoulder as she holds on to him.

****

“ _Cum_ ,” he says again. There’s a sob in his voice and a stutter in his hips and she knows if she moves with him, he’ll cum too. She clenches down tight and swallows his cry of pleasure with her mouth and the pain of his hard, harsh thrusts mingles with pleasure, until her orgasm spikes through her like a firecracker and his name rushes from her mouth in rapture. Heavy fingers clench her thighs tight as he rides his own pleasure out and gasping whispers of exaltation brush across her sweaty, shimmering skin.

****

He stops moving and collapses back onto the mattress, disconnecting the two of them and reaches for her blindly. She follows, and the air is hot and the bedsheets tangle like weeds around them. It’s warm and quiet and still, until his breathing is even and her heartbeat has slowed. Then she lifts her head and watches his face, tracing his long lashes with a delicate fingertip, and she cherishes the kiss he places on her palm.

****

“Why did you push me away in Memphis?” she finally asks. He turns his head and though his eyes have cleared and his body has calmed, electricity still sparkles brightly when she touches him.

****

“Because.”

****

“That’s not an answer,” she says with a soft snort. Tony reaches for her and pulls her over and onto his body until she lies supine on his breast. He feels good beneath her, like something solid and sure but a fantasy all at the same time.

****

“I don’t know if I have an answer, sweetheart,” he admits. “I wanted you. But I didn’t...I wasn’t sure if I should…”

****

“I wasn’t drunk,” she rushes out, as if that would help.

****

“Maybe not. But I was.” He swallows audibly and strokes his fingers up and down her spine, over and over until she thinks she’ll fall asleep like that. “Drunk on you, mostly. But I was scared, I guess.”

****

She almost laughs, except he’s earnest in his confession and she doesn’t want to break the spell around them. “Tony Stark scared of me? I can’t imagine.” But the very idea shoots a thrill through her so potent that when he tugs her down to kiss him again, the fire stokes back to life and she moans for him to touch her again.

.

.

.

.

He takes her as many times as she can handle, on and off through the night. The sheets are a sweaty, ruined mess and the pillows scatter across the room. Tony gets up and turns on the air conditioning, stark naked and beautiful in the moonlight. He wraps her in her blanket and licks a line of sweat up her spine, then coaxes her legs open again and sinks in deep.

****

She loses count of her orgasms and of the time. Tony falls asleep under her breast, beneath her heartbeat, and she threads her fingers through his impossibly soft hair and listens to the hum of the mini fridge in the far left corner. Her eyes search the blinds for the rising sun, for the first dusting of light that spreads across the horizon.

****

When the neon sign blends in with the pink of the dawn in the desert, she hears the music turn on in her head for the first time.

.

.

.

.

“Have you ever thought about being a musician?” she asks him. He sits on the trunk of the car outside of a grocery store past Flagstaff and pops the top on his third soda. They’ve been in Arizona three days and have seen the Grand Canyon twice. He takes her to an abandoned bridge on Route 66 and figures out how to get to the 150 mile stretch of highway that’ll take them to Vegas without having to get back on the interstate again. Shuri’s excited. There’s something exhilarating about being on the road like that with nothing and no one but Tony and the dry, but beautiful landscape.

 

“Once. Like, a long time ago, yeah. And then my dad made sure I didn’t the chance to get my band up and running because he went and died on me.”

 

It’s said with a snort, but there’s regret behind it too. Shuri scoots over closer to him and nudges him with her hip and waits. And like she’s found he’s wont to do, he eventually starts to talk again.

 

“We didn’t get along. At all. The man was one of the most unyielding, irritable, cold people I’ve ever encountered. Nothing I did was good enough. No one I made friends with were from the right families or had the right credentials. I never brought any girlfriends home because I knew he’d find a reason why she wasn’t right for me. And yet…you’d think he’d be a lot more loving toward his only kid, yeah?” Tony scoffed and took a swig of his coke. “The guy was an asshole. He wasn’t even that smart, in retrospect, but as a kid I thought he knew everything. And so, when he told me that my singing voice was shit and I would never be worth a good goddamn by joining a band…I believed him.”

 

Shuri frowns and slides her fingers into his and he grasps them tight. She thinks, almost unbidden, of how those fingers had been between her thighs in the shower that morning, finger fucking her until she’d collapsed on jelly knees and he’d had to hold her steady. And then he’d taken her again on the bed and once more against the door, on his knees with his mouth covering her clit and his tongue inside her. That had been fun.

 

“He didn’t deserve you.”

 

“I know that now. Thank god for therapy, right?” He sucked in a breath and looked at her curiously. “You said your dad was strict…but I’m guessing, even then, he wasn’t a jerk with an inferiority complex, right?”

 

Shuri shakes her head. T’Chaka had been a lot of things, and some of them not that savory she’d found out later, but he’d been a good dad. He’d been rigid, sometimes too much for her tastes, but a good dad nonetheless.

 

“No. He simply pushed us as far as he thought we could go until we eventually got better. My brother is the charming one, the charismatic one. I was the brains. And between the two of us, we could take the company his grandfather had started and turn it into something phenomenal. He always told us so.”

 

“Sounds like a good dude. I would have liked to have met him.”

 

“He would have liked you,” she says, and he smiles. “I mean, after he got over how much older you are-“

 

“And how pale I am,” Tony adds, and Shuri giggles.

 

“That, too. But he’d have liked you. I like you.”

 

Tony’s smile softens into something almost precious. “Do ya?” He leans over and kisses her softly, punctuating it with a happy grunt. “Yeah, you do. I got you over here trembling.”

 

“Oh hush,” she says, though he’s right and she knows he is. “It’s just a little cool out tonight.”

 

“Hm. How about I warm you up then?” He asks. Shuri raises a brow, but when he nods for her to get into the car, she follows and slips into the leather like it’s her home now. She likes to think it could probably be.

 

“What do you have in mind?”

 

“It’s a surprise.” He pulls out the parking lot of the grocery store and hauls ass down the two lane towards the dunes and the cliffs. They drive for long minutes of nothing but the static and Mexican radio in the background until he asks her why she’d asked him about being a musician. The beat that filters around in her head pulses through her like an old friend and she tells him.

 

“I want to write a song.” She stops to gauge his reaction, but he simply waits for her to continue so she does. “I have this music in my head that’s been there a while and…I want to try and get it out in some way.”

 

“Does it bother you that much?”

 

She shakes her head. “It doesn’t bother me. But someone else needs to hear it. I want to talk about it, and share it, but I can’t if I don’t know how to get it out of me.” She feels odd saying that out loud and she turns to watch his reaction again. “You don’t think that’s weird, do you?”

 

“Nope.”

 

He pulls off the main highway onto a dirt road that rocks the car like an amusement park ride, but Tony doesn’t seem phased at all. Shuri holds on to he the door and the seat as best she can, rattled around like a marble in a jar, until the road smooths out into sparse grass and climbs up and around one of the smaller cliffs along the road.

 

“Here’s the thing,” Tony says suddenly. The sun dips down below the horizon as he wounds the car up the cliff. “I feel like if you really want to do the music thing, you should. I think that you deserve to do what drives you and makes you happy.”

 

“So if I told you I wrote poetry, you’d tell me to put them to music and have a go at it?”

 

His smile stretches all the way across his face. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. Poems, huh? Do you write songs, too?”

 

“I don’t know,” she admits, feeling a bit flustered. “I just write whatever comes to mind. It’s not that good, but-“

 

“Oh, no, I’ll be the judge of that,” he says. “You bring anything with you?”

 

“In my knapsack in the trunk.”

 

“Show me when I stop, then. I wanna read a few.” He brakes on the cliff in a flurry of dust and rocks and sits back in the seat expectantly. “I mean, if you want me to read them.”

 

She slips out of her seat and into the dark night. Shuri pops the trunk and riffles through her bag for her journal, and the weight of it is reassuring in her hand. The radio still plays from the idling car but Shuri takes the time to drown that out and listen to her surroundings. It’s so quiet, though nothing is still and for a second, she’s taken aback by how beautiful it is out here. They’re high enough that she can see the dots of lights in the distance of the town. The breeze up here is cooler and the air a little thinner, but Tony’s behind her before she can get too cold, wrapping her in his arms and kissing her neck softly.

 

“Let me see, sweetheart,” he encourages so she twists in his embrace and hands over her journal and watches him expectantly.

 

He takes a while to read through. Her stomach is a mess of butterflies and anticipation. She takes off across the expanse of the cliff table to distract herself and she carves her initials into the rock with a pebble along with the date and Tony’s, too. Up above her, the stars begin to dot the sky like pin pricks against a dark screen. Shuri presses her palms to the ground and she thinks she can feel the heat of the day still linger, though it seeps out bit by bit until it’s evaporating from her, too, and she needs Tony again or she’ll freeze.

 

“Hey, Shuri?”

 

She pops her head up and dusts off her hands to join him at the front of the car.

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Sing something for me.”

 

She raises a brow and jerks her head back in surprise. “I can’t sing,” she starts but he shakes his head and pushes her journal into her hands, his fingers outlining a poem she’d written late at night after one of their phone calls. It’s one of her more tame ones, though she has a feeling he’s probably read through the explicit stuff too. His eyes are too bright and his mouth is wet from where he’s been biting his lips. He’s so close that the cold disappears like a vapor and she sucks in some of the dust and starlight to shift even closer.

 

“Anyone can sing if they wanna. Sing for me. Sing that.”

 

“How? With what?”

 

“To the music in your head.”

 

She knew he’d say that, but somehow hearing it aloud is petrifying. Maybe telling him about that had been a mistake.

 

But maybe it wasn’t. And wasn’t life about taking chances? She’d been doing a lot of that lately.

 

So she leans back against the Mustang and tilts the journal until the light of the moon and the headlights shine bright enough that she can read what she’d written. She takes a moment to grab the melody that plays on a loop through her brain, and then apply her words, and try to make them fit. Minutes pass, with her mouthing words backward and forward, and Tony waiting, patient, his arms encircling her on the hood of the car and keeping the cold from seeping in.

 

And then, finally, she begins to sing.

 

He seems spellbound and she’s surprised at what comes out her mouth. Shuri keeps her eyes trained to the words; some invisible force shifts the words around so that they flow like a fountain against the music, until Tony taps the hood of his car beside her hip in time with her words and her voice and her melody. And just like that, they’ve made a song.

 

She doesn’t realize until she’s done and he pulls away breathless that he’d been recording the whole thing, but she’s glad he’d had the foresight to do so.

 

And she’s glad, finally, when he takes the journal out her hands and whispers for her to lean back and look at the stars, his mouth hot and wet on her belly and his hands grasping her smooth skin like a lifeline.

 

He makes her cum while the taste of her song is still in her mouth.

.

.

.

.

He asks her to marry him in Vegas and of course, she says “no”, but it’s cute to think about. So she buys herself a little baby doll white lace thing she finds in a thrift shop and waltzes around in the bright lights and casinos with him, her body pressed to his as he plays the tables and his kisses on her neck.

 

For whatever reason, though, it feels like the ending of something instead of the beginning. It makes her feel anxious. She ignores it for as long as she can, for as long as they’re in Vegas, until the morning he wakes her and tells her he’s got a day and a half to get to Los Angeles.

 

She also realizes, when they pull back out onto the highway, that they’ve got a day and half till her father’s death. She pushes that away, too, though it’s far more heavy a thing to push.

 

The desert is ever beautiful, even in California. She leans out the window with her hair down and her eyes closed as he plays “Samba Pa Ti” and kisses her fingers. Tony’s hands slip from her own to between her thighs, up the hem of the little sundress she wears, and into her tiny underwear. Shuri slips them off and spreads wide and lets him stroke her slow and steady, then faster, until he’s speeding almost 90 down a deserted highway and she’s gasping out his name, wriggling her hips in time with Carlos Santana’s guitar.

 

Later that night, close to midnight, they make it to Venice Beach, if only because Tony’s got memories there from when he and his mom had come and Shuri’s never been. He parks right in the sand and lets the top down, and here, close to the water, the air outside in June is actually warm and enveloping, like a lover, like a caress. Her lover sleeps deeply in the seats of his classic car and holds her close to his chest and she drifts in and out of a dream, of being under water and watching the world above her burn to ashes. When she wakes again, it’s dawn and there’s dewdrops on Tony’s lashes, but he’s not asleep. He cracks his eyes open and watches her for so long, that it unsettles her.

 

“Do you think I’m using you?”

 

“What?”

 

He shakes his head and moves to get up, probably intending to brush his comment aside, but she feels a weird niggling itch in the back of her brain and she has to confront this. She isn’t sure if she’s ready to confront Baba’s death just yet, but this she thinks she can handle.

 

“No, tell me. What are you talking about?”

 

Tony glances off to somewhere around her head and scrubs sleep from his face but finally speaks again.

 

“I was a few weeks shy of 22. Mom and Dad had been dead all of four months when I met Justin. He was 47 and divorced and instead of telling me to get over my hurt and my anger, he listened.”

 

Oh. She thinks perhaps she knows where he’s going with this now. She wants to protest and say that this isn’t the same thing but she just listens, because he probably needs to get this out.

“He was so sweet. Kind. Open. He didn’t judge my fuck ups or tell me not to take pills or snort lines because I was hurting. He just gave me the number to a good rehab center and let me get to that spot on my own.”

 

“Did you?”

 

Tony’s breath catches. She realizes that maybe he hadn’t.

 

“I spent months desperately trying to fill some hole with this man. I catered to him and followed his advice and did stuff I wasn’t ready to do because he wanted to do it.”

 

“And you’re scared you’re doing the same thing to me.” Shuri twists the neckline of his loose tee shirt and frowns. “Are you?”

 

Tony’s too quiet. She hates it.

 

“I thought maybe...I wanted to fix what happened to me in some sort of way and I thought…”

 

Her stomach drops and her mind feels scrambled, like a fuzzy, out of tune radio station.

 

He doesn’t continue and Shuri feels cold. She gets out of the car and out his lap and stomps over toward the beach on cramped legs. Her bare feet slide in the rough sand, unsteady and unsure, and the last two weeks feel like a dream. But she’s on the beach and the ocean roars in front of her, so this has to be real.

 

“Shuri!” he calls. She keeps walking. She’s crying, and the tears burn her eyes so harshly, she can’t even blink. The sun rises little by little until the lavender sky turns garish blue and she’s knee deep in the Pacific, her chest heaving and her stomach hurting. When the tears clog her throat so tight she can’t breath, she sinks to the water and screams, loud and hard until her chest hurts.

 

“You never had a meeting,” she says, hiccupy tears and anger in her tone. “You drug me across the country to fill some weird, fucked up need you have to fix something that happened before I was even born! The fuck is wrong with you?”

 

“I didn’t want you to hurt the way I did,” he says, but all she hears is nonsense. None of this makes sense. Nothing he’d ever said or did seemed real now. “I didn’t want you to fall into the hole I was in.”

 

“You told me you knew who I was when you met me.”

 

“I knew your dad.”

 

“You told me you’d never met him.”

 

Tony dares to move closer to her and she scoots away from him. He winces, but she can’t quite be bothered enough to feel bad about it.

 

“I was supposed to have met him.” Tony stalls until the sun is high enough that it burns her eyes. “I was supposed to have been in the building when it was bombed.” He swallows hard and his voice catches and it’s then that she does feel bad, if only a little. “He wasn’t even supposed to be there that long. I was.”

 

“Why weren’t you?”

 

“Because I’m a selfish prick that wanted to spend the night before wasted off my ass after my ex left me.”

 

She’d laugh if she were crueler but she isn’t. Instead, she finally meets his eyes and he looks as though he’d been fighting a war. Maybe he had; that was something she might not have ever found out had she never met him.

 

 _No_ , she thinks, _if he’d never found me_.

 

“Did you hunt me down specifically to redeem yourself?”

 

Tony shook his head and she believes him.

 

“No. Meeting you was by chance.”

 

“They why did you ever bring this up?” He could have spent the rest of their trip withholding all of this information and she’d never know the wiser. “Do you honestly feel like you’re responsible for my father dying? You aren’t that special, Tony Stark. There was no divine intervention that saved your life but took Baba’s.”

 

“Could be right about that; but tell me something, if I’m not some great catalyst for everything shit that’s happened to you in the last two years, what makes you think you are too?”

 

Shuri opens her mouth to retort, but she honestly can’t think of a thing to say to that. She sits in the shifting, cool water and picks seaweed from her fingernails. The flesh of her fingertips look like prunes.

 

“You’re a shit therapist.”

 

He almost smiles. “I never claimed to be a good one.”

 

“You didn’t have to take me 3000 miles from one ocean to the other to get that point across.”

 

“Nope. I brought you here just because I like you.”

 

Tony gives up kneeling and flops down into the surf, wrinkling his nose as a particularly strong wave pops up and splashes him dead in the face. Shuri can’t help but snort a little, though she’s still pissed off at him.

 

“You do?” She leans forward and grabs his chin, turning his soaked face to hers again and she ekes out a grin. “Yeah, you do. I’ve got you trembling.”

 

Tony’s laugh doesn’t feel so pure, not the way it had before, but somehow, it feels even better. He peels off his red sunshades and puts them on her head and holds her as the ocean breaks around them and Venice Beach wakes up.

 


	5. five

They take his private jet home because she’s tired of driving. He says he’ll have the Mustang shipped back to New York or maybe he’ll just leave it in Malibu. 

 

“It’s not going anywhere.”

 

“I’m going to miss it,” she says wistfully.

 

There isn’t any more music in her head. Her hands don’t itch to write or scribble down her disjointed, aching thoughts. There is still pain, and probably always will be and she’s got an appointment with a therapist back home in about three weeks, but swelling, unrelenting fear of the man napping in the plush seats of the jet doesn’t swirl around in her body anymore.

 

It’s replaced with something else that she’s not sure she should ever tell him about, so she doesn’t right then.

 

She gets to New York City with eighteen hours to spare until she’s headed back to Wakanda and her laboratory and quiet nights with Mama watching movies. Tony pulls her up the stairs to his penthouse and strips her bare, kisses every inch of her skin and presses her against the big, cool windows as he fucks her. It’s slow and a little painful at this angle and yet, it’s the realest she’s ever felt. This time, it’s her skin on his, nothing between them. This time, she lets the tears that nearly spilled over the first time burst forth like a flooded river and he carries her to his bed and lets her sleep. He takes her to the airport in his Jaguar and makes her a promise that he’ll call one day.

 

She never gets her pictures of New York, but by the time her plane lands home on the tarmac and her mother and her brother pull her into a welcoming hug, she’s got a message on her phone, a smiling emoji and a promise, and when she opens the Dropbox link, there’s enough pictures to convince anyone she’d spent the last two weeks in the Big Apple.

 

She tells her mother about the road trip anyway.

.

.

.

.

It takes him ten years, but he finally calls her.

 

It’s not that they’d had lost touch, per se, but he’d gone one way and she’d gone the other. In between time, he’d retired and gotten back together with his ex and then broke up again. In between time, she’d fallen in love and gotten engaged and broken up and dated. Life moved on the way it always did, no matter who was lost or who’d been stolen. She goes to his conference that next year, the sea of white much more colorful than before and the speakers more diverse and she smiles. But she never goes to find him and he doesn’t hunt her down in the auditorium, so she buries him in her heart and moves on.

 

Or, she tries to move on. He’s left an indelible mark on her soul that no other person in the world will ever match. She thinks back to the last night in New York sometimes, when it’s too quiet and the words don’t want to come the way they had when she was 19 or 20. She curls up under her blankets and she thinks she can still feel his warmth, his breath, the calluses of his big hands and the grumble in his chest as he pressed his lips to her pulse and called her his.

 

_ Mine. Would you mind if I wanted you to be mine? _

 

Shuri Udaku is 30 years old and tired of pretending she didn’t fall in love with Tony Stark the summer she was 20 so she pulls out that old journal and hums the song that she’d made in Arizona. Her fingers shake as she lets them drift over the almost juvenile thoughts that had gone through her head at the time, even the slightly embarrassing erotica, but it was hers and she’d let him read it and he’d never once shamed her or patronized her.

 

So when he calls her, two weeks before the 12th anniversary of her father’s death, she’s already packing and her heart feels lighter than it has in years.

 

“My mother tried to ground me, you know,” she tells him, crying and laughing at the same time. He still sounds the same. He still looks about the same, too, from the pictures she’s meticulously tried to avoid for a decade but couldn’t, though the silver has outgrown the brown. It just makes him even sexier, if that were possible.

 

“I probably would have spanked you, if I were her.”

 

“You would have spanked me anyway,” she says with a laugh and she can almost feel his fingertips on her thighs, and the prickle of his beard across her collarbones. She can’t wait to see him again. It’s a palatable ache.

 

“Goddamn right I would have. With pleasure.” He pauses and his sigh sounds as wistful as her heart feels. “I really did miss you, sweetheart.”

 

“Then you should have called me.”

 

She sounds angry even to her own ears, but really, she isn’t. It had probably been for the best that he had left her the way he did; on good terms but drifting outward to reach for something else so she wouldn’t always wonder if she’d made too rash a decision. After ten years, she found she rarely made such rash decisions anymore.

 

Maybe it was time to remedy that.

 

“Can we go to Memphis again?” She wants to revisit Beale Street and all the clubs. She wants to put on a little leopard print mini skirt and tongue kiss him in a smokey bar.

 

“Yeah. If you want. We fucked around and missed Memphis in May again, but…”

 

“That’s okay.” She smiles. “And Vegas, too.” That little white dress still sits in the back of her closet, after all this time. “Maybe this time I’ll actually marry you.”

 

He sucks in a breath and then lets it out slow and he sounds like warm sugar when he speaks again.

 

“I don’t deserve you,” he tells her, in a raspy voice so full of emotion that it swells and pulses. “I never have. But god, I loved you. I still want you.” 

 

Shuri lies back on the floor of her bedroom and presses the phone against her cheek long after he hangs up. 

.

.

.

.

 

This time she tells her mother where she’s going.

 

She’s got one less bag than she’d had before, a well worn Elvis tee shirt over her jeans, and a pair of old red sunshades she’d kept in her nightstand but never wore on her head. At JFK, she clutches a leather bound journal to her chest, and a silver haired man waits for her at the pickup, his smile familiar and sweet and everything she’d loved.

 

For the first time in a long time, a song plays in her head.

 


End file.
